Weekly Assemblage for 2023 Week 50

Weekly Whaaa…?

Wrapping Up 2023 Fall Semester

This past week was the last official week of 2023 Fall Semester, and I took my final exam for Spanish 2202. It’s been a lot of fun re-learning Spanish, and I’m glad I’ve got another semester of it in 2024 Spring!

I initially learned Spanish from middle school through junior year of high school, then promptly took a year of French from Monsieur Gutekunst (whose Alsace-Lorraine accent didn’t exactly prepare me for spoken French elsewhere). Then in undergrad I did Latin, and for my English grad program at UC Riverside, I did French for reading purposes.

So by the time I began re-learning Spanish, I’ve gotten a lot of familiarity with Romance languages and cognates, but also completely lost my memory for any verb tenses beyond the present. It’ll be interesting to see how much I can keep this time around, after next semester ends.

Enjoying Lee’s Overwhelmed

I’m really enjoying my reading of Maurice S. Lee’s Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution.

The introduction offers a very useful summary of information studies—one that I think would be useful not only for Lee’s intended humanities audience but also for LIS students, professors, and anyone else who thinks about what counts as “information.”

Toxic Positivism, Petro-Masculinity, and Reply Guys

The term “reply guy” simultaneously is incredibly useful shorthand and extremely amorphous. It points to some particularly gendered behaviors, but it also ambiguously points to something like “posting while… guy.” In other words, it’s a term that makes perfect sense in context (here, particular social media platforms) but can benefit from further elaboration.

I might eventually try to elaborate on this, but I think we might use “toxic positivism” as one aspect of what’s happening with reply guy behavior.

It’s also worth pointing out that Scott Barolo and @shrewshrew also have this incredibly handy field guide to The 9 Types of Reply Guys.

You can also click through on the post below to see more about these 9 different types.