MishaOutLoud
mishaoutloud.bsky.social
MishaOutLoud
@mishaoutloud.bsky.social
I inflict computers on old books and vice versa. Digital Humanist by training, press-ganged into writing instruction. Will teach for access to research databases.
Only the 12-hour clock time ISN'T base twelve! Because we say "12" instead of "0" o'clock! 24-hour and 60-minute time? No sweat, works perfectly. But 12-hour? Nooo! Gotta be DIFFERENT!

(attn: @ryannorth.ca )

www.qwantz.com/index.php?co...
Dinosaur Comics!
but i'm ONLY saying "normal minutes" only because they're shorter and therefore allow me to MATHEMATICALLY REDUCE my earlier compliment given to you regarding saving minutes of time, and i hope you fe...
www.qwantz.com
January 2, 2026 at 5:17 AM
Ya'll, I gotta just put this out there. There's a lot of stuff coming across my feed about how the TT job race is a frustrating game of chance and such, and I completely agree...

That's why I don't play it. I've got a lecturing gig that let's me live quite comfortably, and I'm okay with that.
December 17, 2025 at 3:15 PM
This comic is *SO* much bull...

No branch of physics can accurately model squirrels.

www.xkcd.com/3178/
Hyperacute Interdynamics
www.xkcd.com
December 15, 2025 at 4:09 AM
Yes! YES!! Finally! At long last, after years of fruitless guessing, the "What" to guess really is "Chicken Butt."

Rest now. You can rest now.
December 10, 2025 at 4:56 AM
I just spent 3 hours building a tutorial for my students for Word. Nothing earth-shattering, just basic formatting and a few advanced concepts like "Hanging Indent."

Because apparently nobody else is teaching my students that stuff, and I can't even trust them to pick it up on the streets. :-/
December 2, 2025 at 6:37 PM
So... lotsa folks seem to have Opinions(tm) about the OU student who was supposedly failed for citing (read as "referencing) the Bible in a 25 point discussion assignment. *REALLY* wondering how many of them looked at the article the student was responding to.
November 29, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Oh sure... the day I finally break down and google "pete abrahms obituary," Sluggy Freelance updates. >.<
October 29, 2025 at 2:13 AM
Saw "Tylenol lawsuit" as a trending topic and thought "Oh! Tylenol must be, quite understandably, suing the federal government for defamation over the whole 'Tylenol causes autism' stupidity.

So I clicked it.

Gentle reader... it is not that. I should not have clicked it.
October 28, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Giving feedback to student drafts while running a low-grade fever is a *TRIP*! I'm crossing my fingers that A) the feedback was actually useful for revisions, and B) that I didn't say anything incredibly stupid. >.<
October 24, 2025 at 10:40 PM
I love how, when pressed on "demolishing the White House is kinda unprecedented", the administration says "No, every president makes changes to the White House..."

But when pressed on why it's necessary, they say "The White House hasn't been updated since Truman..."
October 24, 2025 at 10:25 PM
Reflecting (aka "brooding") on this morning's tech outage has reminded me:

I have a PhD and 10 years of pedagogy experience, and my job performance is largely gauged by what amounts to Yelp reviews from teenagers.

Meanwhile, university tech decisions are gauged by... divine fiat?
October 20, 2025 at 4:10 PM
In a previous post, I almost called Amazon "an online book retailer with delusions of grandeur," but scrubbed it because its grandeur isn't actually a "delusion" anymore.

And "overgrown" seemed insufficient to the point I had in mind.

I think "metastatic" might be the term I am looking for.
October 20, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Also, I've recently read some pushback on "the cloud is just other people's computers" that basically amounted to "No, the scale/redundency/clustering makes it a totally other thing!"

Kinda feeling like this AWS thing is a kind of vindication of the "other people's computers" standpoint.
October 20, 2025 at 2:36 PM
I'm not a big fan of the Internet Industrial Complex. And I realize I take that disgust and distrust further than most.

But when I can't grade student assignments on the University's course management suite because Amazon is having tech issues, we can all agree this is a bad timeline, yeah?
October 20, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Not gonna lie... I'm wishing I'd invested in an inflatable frog costume company this time a month ago...
October 19, 2025 at 12:09 AM
This is terrible and chilling in its own right...

... and probably also screws up Dog-Only-Knows how much of @damnyouwillis.bsky.social 's comics buffer. >.<
UPDATE: Following the firing of the director of the student newspaper, Indiana University has now cut the print edition of the newspaper entirely.

www.idsnews.com/article/2025...
October 15, 2025 at 10:30 PM
We bought an AirTag equipped collar for the cat, and finally had a need to use it today...

... Only to discover that the AirTag only responds if a paired iPhone is near it.

Apple, if I knew where to take the phone to get it near the AirTag, it would obviate needing to find the AirTagged cat. :-/
October 11, 2025 at 4:24 AM
Sinus weirdness is making me kinda spacey and out of it today. But as much as that sucks, it is somehow distracting me from being anxious and procrastrinate-y about stuff, and I am getting SO MUCH DONE!!
October 9, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Today I get to play everybody's favorite Autumn semester game, "Is This Weather-Related Sinus Blahs, or Am I A Walking, Viral Plague Rat?"
October 9, 2025 at 4:17 PM
One of the weirdest advantages of teaching this Codebreaking class is I'll catch myself having fun and "goofing off" in my office, chastise myself for it, then realize that, no, I'm actually prepping for class. :-D
October 7, 2025 at 3:07 PM
I don't know what is more surprising: that @rhadden.bsky.social is on Bsky, or that @rhadden.bsky.social found *ME* on Bsky, given my whopping 8 followers. :-D
October 7, 2025 at 1:55 AM
I have to do age verification to access Bluesky's *CHAT* feature?

Is there... uhm... "adult content" going on in the chat feature that I should know about?
September 30, 2025 at 2:16 AM
I feel like I'm finally mastering the "I'm not sure how to phrase this so it lands right" to "Do I actually need to say it at all?" pipeline.
September 25, 2025 at 4:07 PM
I do what I want, @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social!!
September 23, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Wait, so are there vaccines in Tylenol now, or is it Tylenol in vaccines? Or do they cause autism in different ways? I am so confused...
September 23, 2025 at 1:47 AM