For the Canadian history #TTRPG crowd, today's the last day to support Lonely Timbers/Tire-toi une bûche, a bilingual game about early 20th-century French-Canadian lumberjacks.
Je l'aurais appelé « Des pitounes en sacre », mais bon.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Jagash/lonely-timbers-tire-toi-une-buche/posts/4837299
Nothing in the humanities academe is simultaneously so awe-inspiring and dispiriting as going through applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position. What a profoundly broken world in which none of these people have permanent jobs.
Almost walked into a coyote tonight.
Also, when they happen between faculty, these conversations uniformly begin from the premise that all students are using LLMs to extrude their work. Of course, this isn't true - we all work with students who are as horrified by our societal surrender to slop as any of us. And I know that at least some of them feel betrayed by faculty who assume they're all cheating.
So, please, colleagues, try not to be shitty. And maybe the next time you find yourself in one of these meetings, especially if students are present, consider making the point that many students are trying hard to learn the skills we have long taught, even those that genAI is programed to simulate.
Every single meeting at the university right now devolves almost immediately into flailing about genAI.
Though, in the end, it was fine. My PhD student RA jumped in and ran the meeting, the undergrad RAs contributed interesting things, and, once I finally bothered to turn up, they filled me in on all the great stuff they're doing and solid choices they've made. Who needs management, anyway?
TFW you're 27 minutes late to your own meeting.
My institution calling its central AI hub a "kitchen" makes me wanna barf.
Which is appropriate, since there's no English on the package.
These snacks are no-English-on-the-package spicy.
"A criminal court found my rapist guilty — U of T still hasn’t"
An anonymous article from one of the student papers at the University of Toronto.
https://thevarsity.ca/2026/10/11/a-criminal-court-found-my-rapist-guilty-u-of-t-still-hasnt/
Had a meeting aimed at generating policy on LLM use in grading. Another humanist brought up the term "cognitive surrender." The University's rush to embrace slop feels more like cognitive suicide to me.
Starting a relatively small writing project I'd hoped to finish 4 months ago.
There are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs out there. So when someone asks you to write a letter of recommendation and the deadline is over three weeks away say "yes" and send the damn thing in on time. Don't write to the posting Department and ask for another week or two. We're all busy, and it'd be nice to not have to write so many letters, but your letter could potentially help get someone a job they've spent decades in some cases working towards; not submitting your letter on time could torpedo them. And this is actually your job. Oh yeah, and without people having written for you, you wouldn't be in a position to write for someone else. So get over yourself already and pay it forward.
Today, many in #Canada wear orange shirts in remembrance of Indigenous children who attended residential schools, whether they survived or not. By its very nature, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation tends to evoke self-satisfaction among some. We remember so-called historical "dark chapters" and in so doing pat ourselves on the backs for our liberal plurastic values - we are good because we remember hard things. But history - and I say this as a historian who's worked on residential schools - is only ever partially about the past. It's also about the present and the futures we'd like to build. Wearing a certain shirt on a certain day can help us move towards a better future, but it can also just reinforce our feelings of moral superiority while failing to help anyone actually dealing with legacies of injustice. I don't have a solution. I just know that public displays of memory, especially memory involving the oppressed and marginalized, need to be a beginning not an end.
Pleased to report that despite the many ignorant (Leafs) fans on this afternoon's train to the city, there are a good number of the enlightened (Habs supporters) too.
