Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 28/09/2026What’s more: I don’t quite want to say that you NEVER get to do those things after you graduate, but you will never again inhabit a space where it is ENCOURAGED like that, and eventually you will come to miss that part of undergrad life even more than you miss being able to get drunk on a Thursday. 021
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 23/09/2026The most Robert Eggers version of Romeo and Juliet imaginable would be a theatrical proshot staged in an exacting replica of the Globe theater using authentic Elizabethan techniques (Brooklyn accents, unruly groundlings, twink Juliet) 010
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I think it’s actually more fun to come up with characters who would crumble INSTANTLY 041
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Cowboy Bebop’s *music* is better than Star Wars’ [dives into a bomb shelter] 010
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesComics in the Spooky Age 🧛♂️🧟♀️🎃 @comicsinthega.bsky.social · 06/09/2026The Mandrake the Magician Sunday strip from September 6, 1959. 1123175
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 06/09/2026I’ve seen P-Funk twice, and one time the show went so well that the venue literally had to turn off the band’s microphones, at which point George Clinton led the crowd in a chant of “ain’t no party like a P-Funk party, ‘cause a P-Funk party don’t stop!” for what seemed like ten minutes straight. 110
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 03/09/2026mix this 50/50 with Everclear for a “Sidenafil Screwdriver” 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 21/08/2026The Táin is one of the stranger bits of ancient epic literature. It has moments of incredible beauty and grandeur, but the other 80% is just walking through the Irish landscape like “ah, and now we come to Jamestown, so named because this is where Cú Chulainn beat James to death with a rock.” 110
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesSumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 20/08/2026When I first moved to SoCal and took my child to the city library (as one does, first thing), this book title had me confused for several minutes. 19517119
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 20/08/2026I’m just a simple country lawyer, but it seems to me that if we had a whole bunch of additional economic-sanctions-type levers to pull, and the choice that we made instead was to (checks notes) blow up a school full of children, we uhhhhhh deserve to burn in hell 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 11/08/2026See this is the problem with running your financial system on specie! Whether it’s cheese or gold, hard currency is vulnerable to exogenous shocks. (Luckily in America, we have long since embraced Fiat Cheese, wherein the government tells you “that’s cheese” and you just have to deal with it.) 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 06/08/2026Bluey is a good example of Todorov’s Fantastic in that you never quite know whether the parents are playing pretend or whether something supernatural’s at work Just as in the gothic works Todorov studied, the naturalistic explanation is *pretty* clearly right… but there’s just enough room for doubt 130
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt Stokeswhet moser @whetmoser.com · 29/07/2026feels like every 10 years people are like: oh wait, john leguizamo can *act* act 5351
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 29/07/2026My take on the Odyssey is that it’s past time to start thinking of Ludwig Göransson as “the good Hans Zimmer” 110
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 28/07/2026I was looking up the etymology of baba ganoush this morning, and man. Totally unprepared. “Flirtatious daddy?” (??) (??????) 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 24/07/2026A *proper* Scrooge prologue would just be the story of him methodically ripping every tender sentiment out of his still-twitching flesh, and sacrificing the bloody remains on the altar of Capital. It would end with his only friend being dragged off to torment in hell. 100
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 23/07/2026me when I have had either not enough coffee or even slightly too much coffee 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 22/07/2026Supposing I wanted to learn how to appreciate reality TV: are there particular classic seasons or episodes that I should watch? Stuff that has really stood the test of time? This is partially a question about canon-formation: are there canonical texts in this field? But it’s not only that… 100
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 21/07/2026This is pretty unique for an American hard ciders in that, when it describes itself as dry, it is not lying through its teeth 100
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 17/07/2026today I learned about Tommy McHugh, a construction worker and sometime petty criminal who, in his early 50s, tried to poop so hard that he gave himself a brain aneurysm, slipped into a coma, and woke up as a gifted cubist painter 100
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 08/07/2026shout out to my man S22 for failing both tests with honor and integrity (I’m not joking, I think that’s genuinely admirable) 110
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesMovies Silently @moviessilently.bsky.social · 03/07/2026I cracks me up when people are like "You couldn't make THIS movie or show today because people are so politically correct and sensitive!" Sir. There was an entire board in Hollywood dedicated to sniffing out any onscreen hint of married people having sex. Lucy couldn't say "pregnant." Sit down. 4382871331
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 30/06/2026In the parade of horrors issuing from the corrupt conservative majority on the Supreme Court, I’d like to make space for the particular stupidity of Kavanagh’s concurrence. Preface with a grain of salt — I’m not a lawyer, much less a constitutional scholar. But his argument seems to run like this: 100
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 29/06/2026when I was writing this rough draft, I apparently thought it would be a good idea to include 21 different examples and diagrams and honestly if that’s the caliber of “good idea” that past me was working with, I have my doubts about the paper’s core thesis 110
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesLauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 24/06/2026Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts 196133306755
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesVance Maverick @vancemaverick.bsky.social · 21/06/2026The Arnold Schoenberg Center just posted a page from the notes kept by a fellow student, Leonard Stein, which seems to give the specific problem Cage was set. (Complete with C clefs.) "Check possibilities systematically." www.instagram.com/p/DZwo-QJj77k/ 083
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesVance Maverick @vancemaverick.bsky.social · 21/06/2026Many of you will know this anecdote from Cage's "Silence": 162
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 18/06/2026suddenly struck by the realization that Those Who Walk Away From Omelas is just what happens when you DO remove Spiders Georg from the sample 120
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 29/05/2026I feel like knowing Wyeth’s other art makes all the difference here. Like why does this piece *and only* this piece feel like a De Chirico? 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 25/05/2026All muppet 4’33” feat. Kermit and Animal 0133
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 23/05/2026The kids are building a rocket ship out of cardboard boxes and I got to design the control panel 010
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 12/05/2026Grades, submitted! To the fainting couch, posthaste! [flop] 020
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 12/05/2026Grading a student assignment on “Fly me to the moon,” and having to forcibly remind myself that the actual song has nothing to do with jiu-jitsu. 000
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 11/05/2026The Wikipedia page for Wings (1927) has a section that’s like “two people died filming of the aerial stunts — which is really not that bad, if you think about it.” 010
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 08/05/2026On the original recording, you can hear Tommy Flanagan try to lift the piano just a couple of times and then give up 010
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 07/05/2026I’m in grading purgatory right now, which usually means either musicals or horror films playing in the background. But instead I’m watching the Emerald Fennel Wuthering Heights, which is kind of both. 150
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt Stokesweird medieval guys @weirdmedieval.bsky.social · 06/05/2026A pneumatic goblet designed by Ismail al-Jazari in the 13th century. When the goblet is filled with wine, the duck on top begins to scream and rotate before stopping with its beak pointed at a random partygoer. It doesn't stop screaming until the chosen person has drained the goblet completely. 7676149
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 06/05/2026rewatching Night of the Hunter, and I can still hardly believe this film is real. It feels like someone trying to describe a nightmare about watching an old movie. 010
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 04/05/2026György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique is a work for a hundred mechanical metronomes, started in synch and gradually decaying into chaos and then into silence. It becomes surprisingly poignant — the last labored ticks from the last surviving metronome feel like the heat death of the universe. 110
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 02/05/2026Bob and Carol and Ted and Grogu and Alice 020
Jordan Carmalt Stokes @floreustebius.bsky.social · 02/05/2026Watching Species (1995) while I grade papers, and look, I was prepared for this movie to be *pretty* stupid, but I was not prepared for the alien to trick the detectives just by dying her hair, and then for one of the detectives to figure it out because he sees a commercial for hair dye on his TV 010
Reposted by Jordan Carmalt StokesStephen Hopkins @phil-lol-ogist.bsky.social · 24/04/2026My favorite art history genre is "Judith beheading Holofernes" 5065251391