Chris Herde - Medieval Joy Edition

Union automotive mechanic in Wisconsin and a high-school band director in Kentucky.

I'm so ready for the return of political excommunications

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

When I say this today what I mean is that a necessary but not sufficient step toward the US having any kind of future credibility in my nephews' lives, the GOP has to be run out of power and public life and treated like the Nazis after WWII.

We will not have credibility in my own lifetime.

How I wept tonight.

“We can endure this, & be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here.”

Came across the phrase "cognitive DDOS" to describe our present culture.

Understood instantly what it meant.

This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI.

AI does three main things:

1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive

2) transfer wealth upwards

3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)

Yes, we need employment because food and rent etc. Yes, the job market is terrible so we need to work like crazy to even have a prayer.
We know. I'm a fucking millennial for God's sake. I'm aware.
We also need joy. We need connection and hope and community.
We need, dare I say it, some Humanities

Serious and clear-eyed discussions about the state of the job market are important in academia. I won't argue with that.
But that shouldn't be all there is. Every academic I've met is a brilliant person driven to their field by a passion that is infinitely more motivating than a financial incentive

And more importantly for me, I have already seen at least one colleague who was close to burning out, afraid they weren't going to be able to finish their PhD, walk away from my GoFI genuinely excited about the possibilities of their next semester.

I haven't been on the modern academic job market yet, so I can't be confident this actually works, but crucially most of the profs giving out career advice also have very little experience on THIS job market and the ones that have all emphasize that small unique unusual things got them over the line

I have since reworked and personalized the basic message into "The Gospel of Fuck It", which I regularly preach to my post-prelims colleagues.

I fully believe this simple shift in rhetoric has:
1) motivated me toward productive alt-ac plans
2) improved my teaching skills and professional network, thus improving my odds on the academic job market, and
3) significantly decreased the odds that I burn out and quit my program pre-graduation

Immediately after that talk, I started taking side classes in UW's game design program and started designing boardgames. Since then I've built on that foundation to make connections in the games industry AS WELL AS in academic circles I never would have entered previously.

At the core, it wasn't much more than a reframing of the usual alt-ac convo, but it was the first one I'd had that was invigorating rather than draining. It didn't just make me less anxious about the job market, it also made me more excited for my academic work as well.

And so rather than thinking first about commercial viability and asking "could I accept that in place of academics?", he advocated first asking "what else do I enjoy/find fulfilling?" and looking for ways to gain those skills through the university and THEN asking experts of that field about careers

The one exception was a presentation by a representative of the AHA who presented it not as a backup plan but as increased bargaining power. He pointed out that we were all already enrolled long-term at a university which had the resources to teach us any skills we could want to learn...

This is eminently true and also (in my opinion) a failure of rhetoric. Almost every alt-ac conversation I've ever been a part of has been implicitly framed as "ok so after you fail at this..."
🧵

Hey, @medievalsky, do any of you have institutional access to the British Library or U Toronto at present? If so, do you have the ability to get a scan (full or partial) of this book?

search.worldcat.org/title/107574...

Doing art badly is good and sacred

Just have the first lecture of my first we've class as Instructor of Record!
#medievaljoy
... how do y'all manage to write three lectures a week while still doing research?
Hell how do you manage to do that for multiple different classes?
If y'all are wizards you gotta tell me!
#medievalpanic

🎵Come out La Migra goons
In your stumbling platoons
Tell your wives how you ate shit on ice for quotas
Tell her how despite your guns
all you ever did was run
from the cold and frozen streets of Minnesota!🎵

The muddy, disgusting, surprisingly-shallow Ohio.

's a good fuckin river, though

A little Midwest wisdom I've picked up over the years:
If you want to be able to drive without fear of ice, you'll need to be ready and willing to salt the earth.

visenyaism on tumblr: "Honestly fuck A1 for making me have to go on and on defending the dignity of toil like I'm some kind of protestant"

... and then (if you're me) you realize just how often you left citations as a problem for Future Chris! XD

Congrats on the milestone!

Do any of y'all have friends in Morocco at the moment? Specifically Rabat?
There are a couple of manuscripts in the Khazinat al-Ammah that I'd like to get eyes on and possibly images of, but the budget doesn't stretch to plane tickets.

#medievalsky #research #academicsky

In the Mamluk Sultanate, these are the same group chat.

They have been sorely lacking in the aesthetic department up until now.
Robes wouldn't hurt either. Put in some effort, people!