Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Academia in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short 120
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026More and more watching the president is like seeing a possum out in broad daylight. 150
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026An acorn from our oak tree just hit my head, is there a culture in which this is an omen of something 130
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I’m angry all the time and have no patience for anyone but I met this goat recently and that was pretty ok 040
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Why why why is it always the philosophers www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...nytimes.comOpinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to. 170
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Found a 1965 edition of Tristram Shandy edited by Ian Watt; inside were two intercity rail tickets for Helsinki to Kuopio from 1996 1191
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Humphry Clinker implies the existence of Humphry Clink 040
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026When they say “college isn’t for everyone,” they mostly mean “the cost of college isn’t for everyone,” and mostly the ones who say it are the ones who decided to make it that way. 151
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Asked the guy at Best Buy if they had any DVD players and he said “good question, let me see” like he was going to have to go to the basement to check the occult section 480
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026The thing about the iced coffee at the interview is that it doesn’t go hard *enough.* You rock up with an old school Italian steampunk brass machine on a cart and pull fresh shots for everyone in the room, you get the gig on sheer audacity. 040
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Seriously tho, why do kids like stickers so much, what did kids do before stickers 150
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 25/09/2026So weird that the humanities are useless and don’t matter but people in power keep wanting to shut them down 160
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Screw you Bluesky, my Robert Browning poetry joke would have killed in a room of Robert Brownings 160
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 23/09/2026This is some serious The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church shit we’re going through right now #Browning 130
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 22/09/2026I never use the other settings on my shower head. Got like eight settings. One of them could open a portal to another universe. Transdimensional travel, built right into the shower head, two clicks past mist. I’d never know. I’ll never know. 250
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026A fancy provost allegedly using AI to write papers and op-eds is a big problem, but a bigger problem is why we all have no problem believing a fancy provost used AI write papers and op-eds. I should find that hard to believe. I don’t. 2163
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Career achievement unlocked: my article, “Encyclopedic Divisions: Lexicon Technicum (1704) and the Gendering of ‘Universal’ Knowledge,” is now out in the Summer 2026 issue of ECS! Thanks to all who helped included those who helped by not helping. #18thcentury 185
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Rejection is a big part of academia, which is why I keep a true shadow cv with all the hexes, curses, imprecations, mysterious illnesses, crop failures, and barren livestock I’ve called down on people 050
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 20/09/2026People have been creating computer viruses for years, turnabout is fair play 1125
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Trustees: what do you do Humanists: well, like all of us around here we make better people T: what’s the margin on those H: hey? T: what do you sell them for H: come again T: you said you make people, how much do they go for H: T: are you an idiot? H: T: ok program cancelled 0195
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 19/09/2026That part of the summer when it's always been summer and it will always be summer and there's no escape from summer 180
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 18/09/2026One thing I like about my job is that it gives me a reason—requires me!—to know stuff about other stuff. Not at expert levels, but with familiar curiosity. Literary studies is always already interdisciplinary. 1323
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Me, ten years ago: I’m terrified about the future of the world Me, now: oh wait ok yeah I was wrong, *this* is what it feels like to be terrified about the future of the world 070
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 17/09/2026I submitted a thing I wrote! Now to slowly lean forward onto a needle pointed at my eye so I can externalize the experience of waiting 060
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Me, three years ago: AI is tobacco Me, two years ago: AI is corn syrup Me, this year: AI is guns 2102
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 16/09/2026This must be why my wife left me for a rich ankylosaurus 080
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 15/09/2026You can be promoted to full professor with a series of articles if you can prove they were ignored as much as a second monograph would have been 2100
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I could be ten times better or ten times worse at my job and it wouldn’t make a difference either way to my salary, prospects, recognition, or anything really, also good morning everyone, yay morning, morning is just great 1293
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026How about we have two separate tracks in college, an AI-allowed track and an AI-not-allowed track and we put the one you choose on your transcript and see what shakes out 1276
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026I could look this up but I want you all to know how square I am: is LSD actually acidic or is that just a nickname 130
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Explaining to my kid that when I was young there were like two kinds of apples commercially available and one of them was garbage. She couldn’t believe it. The Honeycrisp Generation is weak. 170
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I put all my passwords in scholarly articles because I know no one will see them 090
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026After weeks of terrible heat and dryness it’s finally raining so I’m out on my driveway going full Shawshank 240
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Me, teaching Sprat’s History of the Royal Society: ok so long story short the reason you don’t write poems about dissecting frogs in bio is because of the English Civil Wars 041
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Probably it’s more complicated but it feels like a bunch of dudes really didn’t like English class in high school so now we’re all going to die 071
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Engineers: AI might destroy humanity in ten years Me: 140
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Really not enjoying myself on this site anymore so I think it’s time you all left 280
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026I was standing on the corner of Mercer and Washington Place when the towers came down, which is two miles away from Ground Zero and still a lot closer than that bastard was 150
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026I like my tea hot, my books old, and my bargains Faustian. 051
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026I took this photo of sea otters and I think it is highly meme-able because one of them looks like an idiot and the other one is looking at the first one like it’s realizing it’s with an idiot, and this is relatable content. Please circulate. 04910
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 06/09/2026AI will take over in the US because the US is a cult of convenience that worships the false god of what it calls efficiency. 251
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Just realized that this year is the twentieth anniversary of my first academic publication, on Our Mutual Friend in Dickens Studies Annual. 070
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Scorn ever bubbles within me, but this summer I saw an #oystercatcher and chick, so that was nice. #birds 190
Seth Rudy @sethrudy.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Me: I’m so hot is this sweating sickness Wife: we haven’t had that since the sixteenth century Me: yeah so we don’t know all the symptoms, I could have it Wife: it’s 104 degrees out Me: two things can be true 150
