iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Bilge Yesil @bilgeyesil.bsky.social · 17h

My department has a new opening in Cinema Studies! Please spread the word. cuny.jobs/staten-islan...

cuny.jobs

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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

A tweet by SarahStarberry that says "oh god read the vertical axis" on top of a chart measuring AI models' release dates and model numbers rather than any real capabilities

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Kudos to @acls1919.bsky.social for stating this explicitly in their request for reviewers. That stance & explanation definitely made me more eager to accept the invitation to review!

Please note that due to privacy concerns, we do not allow peer reviewers to use generative AI tools for this work. ACLS applications contain both personal information and intellectual property and must be kept confidential by both ACLS and reviewers. You may not upload any applicant materials into AI-enabled digital tools, and you may not query AI for assistance during the process.

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Mollie Katzen @molliekatzen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There are more Cornell frat boys accused of raping one woman than there are trans athletes competing in all of NCAA sports.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The gap between "Media scholars and theater people" and "cool people" is vast...

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Sorry, but Slings & Arrows never became cool! (Fantastic, but not cool)

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Exit, pursued by a fucking bear

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'm guessing this poll will trigger what you wrote about before: a massive flood of TV ads. Alas it will be one-sided attacks on Janoo from the national GOP - I'm bracing for how nasty it will get

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Have you ever felt that your entire career has just been elaborate preparation to watch a single film?

youtube.com

You Can See Everything | Official Trailer HD | A24

YouTube video by A24

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Tonight marked the end of the Vermont summer concert season, albeit on a chilly wet night. Of Monsters and Men brought it hard, with a lot more rock show energy than I’d expected, led by a tremendous drummer!

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

to foreground coming-of-age experiences along with cultural credentialing (less the degree, more connections & legitimacy of the brand name). One future for schools like ours is dropping the charade that the quality of education is that much better - and just owning that it's an entry into a club.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

More seriously, I do wonder about the huge number (majority?) of institutions that already detach coming-of-age from credentialing: community colleges & urban commuter universities. Not that those models have "figured it out," but there are precedents and arguably have enabled the selective colleges

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Good piece! Although the large typesetting of the initial A made me think the first sentence was "I arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal." Bold admission!

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[in]Transition @intransition.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

New issue just launched, with nine new video essays on topics including Red Desert, One Night in Miami, surveillance footage, visual representations of sound, feminist zombie narratives, the British cine-club movement, and Before Sunrise! Check them out: intransition.openlibhums.org/issue/1969/i...

intransition.openlibhums.org

[in]Transition | Issue: Issue: 3(13) (2026)

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I think you cancel an IPO because you are worried people won't give you the $ you predicted, not because you should now focus on safety.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Tony Bennett's first album was in 1951, last in 2021. Stones have to last another six years to match that career!

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The TV series? It's really great!

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"The Pitt" is now a synonym for "television circa 2010"

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Helena Fitzgerald @hellafitzgerald.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

we watched I Love Boosters and 9 to 5 on two consecutive nights this weekend and it turns out that's a surprisingly perfect double feature, I can't believe there are two different movies that ask "what if you got really high and fed Das Kapital into the outfit computer from Clueless"

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A.J. Wilden🏳️‍⚧️ @wcwit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"They're not misunderstanding the film; they're co-opting a message"

Screencap from the interview linked in the quoted post

Marlow Stern (the interviewer): You have one of the most renowned replies in Twitter history. Elon Musk tweeted out, “Take the red pill,” then Ivanka Trump enthusiastically wrote, “Taken!” to him, and then you replied, “Fuck both of you.” I’m curious how you feel about the co-opting of “The Matrix” by those on the right who don’t really seem to understand its messaging.

Lilly Wachowski: I mean, I can’t sit in a room and explain the movie to every single person who watches it. Even if I did sit in a room with Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump — yikes — it doesn’t matter. They’re not misunderstanding the film; they’re co-opting a message. And that’s what fascists do: They co-opt the messages of progressives and use it to their benefit to confuse and obfuscate what is going on and the intention of their ideology. They do it with everything. They do it with Martin Luther King Jr. Look at how they’ve changed the idea of what antisemitism is.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Speaking of how Rod Stewart looks, a couple of years ago small town Vermont was abuzz with Rod Stewart sightings! Turns out it was a lookalike, but the press coverage was pretty great: www.sevendaysvt.com/music/someon...

sevendaysvt.com

Someone Like You: Vermont Sightings of Rod Stewart Were False (but Also Awesome) | Seven Days

Some guys have all the luck. And then there's me. On Friday, Seven Days reported that gazillion records-selling pop star Sir Rod Stewart and his...

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There's even a set of instructions on how to produce it: It's time to play the music It's time to light the lights It's time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight It's time to put on make up It's time to dress up right It's time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show tonight

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"Efficiency" or "enshittification"?

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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

🚨 BEWARE of VoteSafe.org 🚨 While it bills itself as a “safe” way to register to vote, it is actually a digital surveillance machine created by Elon Musk’s super PAC.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 10/09/2026

The thing liberals fundamentally don't understand is that trans people are losing rights they already had. We're not asking for more, we're asking not to lose what we already had for decades. Most sports leagues and the Olympics had inclusion criteria for decades without issue.

Screenshot of an X (formerly Twitter) exchange discussing political pragmatism and the Overton window.
The initial post by onion person (@CantEverDie) reads:
> "doesn't matter, this is about what the right is able to push with the overton window. first its democrats needing to disavow trans women in sports to get elected, next it'll be agreeing to ban access to HRT to get elected. we've seen how this plays out"
>
A reply from Nick Pappas (@NickAPappas) reads:
> "Are you insane? The Overton window didn’t even include this discussion until recently. The public has never been in favor of desegregating the sports by sex.
> Personally I’m glad Barack Obama ran against gay marriage in 2008. Not because that was the right position, or one he even actually held, but because he knew the public wasn’t with him on it. If he hadn’t won he wouldn’t have been able to appoint 2 of the justices who ultimately voted in the majority for Obergefell.
> Lincoln in 1860 didn’t even run on abolishing slavery! He just wanted to stop its expansion. And thankfully he did that and won because a more extreme and morally correct position would have lost. As a result he was able to win the Civil War and push through the 13 amendment.
> Political practicality is the entire history of progress in America. There’s no other way."
>

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It's so baked into our practices that it's hard to imagine "what if there weren't grades?" in all facets of education. But those hypotheticals can be useful - what's gained by assigning a letter on an assignment? By quantifying & ranking students? The key question: how do grades help learning?

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Changing the relationship between assignments & grades can help recenter a course's actual goal: learning. These cheating students all seem interested in learning, but not on their courses' terms. The real problem is the underlying transactional model driving higher ed, largely focused on grades.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Interesting points, but I'm shocked that the word "grade" doesn't appear at all. The underlying assumption throughout is that a course's function is for students to produce assignments that faculty must grade, creating an "output" on a transcript. But it misses a key place where reforms can help (+)

nymag.com

The College Students Finding New Ways to Cheat With AI

Colleges are testing new ways to catch AI use. It isn’t working.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

A truly infuriating & demoralizing read: Let us mourn for a global industry that provided the only livable wage for educated Africans doing intellectual labor for privileged lazy Americans, put out of business by replacing noble human cheaters with profiteering & environment-destroying machines.

nytimes.com

Kenyans Made a Living Writing College Essays. Then A.I. Arrived. (Gift Article)

Thousands of Kenyans made a living writing essays for overseas students. With A.I., the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

So many moral horrors entangled in this paragraph and the word "unnoticed": "He sometimes considered the ethics of helping students cheat, but decided it was ultimately their choice. He said he saw himself as a tutor and was proud that a young Kenyan was thriving unnoticed inside Western academia."

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

nytimes.com

Kenyans Made a Living Writing College Essays. Then A.I. Arrived. (Gift Article)

Thousands of Kenyans made a living writing essays for overseas students. With A.I., the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline.

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bluevoter24.bsky.social @bluevoter24.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Finally! That's what I'm talking about! #politics

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Make your favorite film sound as boring as possible without giving away the title: The kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being anybody has ever known plays a lot of solitaire.

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Philip Gourevitch @pgourevitch.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

How it started… how it’s going

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Certainly it’s not everyone nor even most. But there is a significant number, like everywhere

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Yep. And many students have been acculturated to the idea that the goal of education is to get good grades, by any means necessary. So they are driven by accomplishments & credentials over learning - as that's how they got here and it's often all they know.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Great thread by Ryan - particularly the key point he makes about how such AI policing falls hardest on contingent faculty. Making it the default would at least normalize such policies and support those with least institutional power:

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Exactly the case for all types of collaboration: default is that assignments are result of single student's effort. But for some assignments, courses, or even disciplines (like filmmaking), collaboration is allowed & encouraged, as laid out by the instructor.

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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Look, are we the laughing stock of the world? Yes. Are we losing a war we should’ve never started? Yes. Is all our food poison now? Yes. Are all the jobs going away? Yes. But the important thing is a blue-haired college student I made up in my head feels bad about memes.

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Jason Mittell @jmittell.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

It's an apartment building over a diner in Ohio.

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Carlos Maza @carlosmaza.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

NEW VIDEO: Video Essay Creep youtu.be/itSlOoKo1t0?...

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