Academia!

You're not tired of Twitter disputes yet, art you? Good!

There was a previous one (I saw it May 18th, but it was from a May 15th article) that had really gotten under my skin.

There are plenty of good reasons to be against AI and there has been a lot of that in the news lately:

https://theconversation.com/news-sites-are-locking-out-the-internet-archive-to-stop-ai-crawling-is-the-open-web-closing-274968 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pope-leo-uses-first-major-papal-text-to-warn-about-dangers-of-ai/ar-AA242BKX 

The news sites seem to have been mainly driven by financial issues, and the Pope by concern for humanity. What set off the storm I noticed was caused by arXiv taking action against hallucinated citations: 

https://byteiota.com/arxiv-bans-authors-1-year-for-ai-hallucinated-citations/ 

I had never heard of arXiv before, but they are "a free distribution service and open-access archive" focusing more on science and math.

https://arxiv.org/ 

Their repository includes economics, which was interesting because those were the hit dogs that howled loudest, so to speak.

Hallucinated citations have increased over the past few years. Rightly concerned about this, they have announced that authors submitting papers with references to non-existent papers will be banned for a year and that after their papers will need to be approved by a peer-reviewed source before acceptance.

As is frequently the case, the reason it became a thing is that someone upset said something that other people could not believe.

I believe that was started by James Miller, but then continued by Lenka Zdeborova (whom I'll get to later):

https://x.com/JimDMiller/status/2056514276311916768 

You can read if you want. 

Miller makes what almost seems like a reasonable point; if you spend a lot of time looking at citations, you know that errors happen.

That is true, but there is a big difference between, say, misspelling one author's name or getting a page number wrong, compared to referring to a paper that doesn't exist. An error could make referring to the original paper more difficult, but unless everything is wrong you can probably do some keyword searches referencing the authors or check a different year but the same month of the publication and find it, then check the reference.

His excuse is that he works with lots of coauthors, sometimes who speak different languages, and he has to trust them. When you start referring to twenty coauthors, I start to wonder what level of academic rigor is being upheld.

For the research I have been working on, the greatest number of authors on any of the papers in my literature study was six. 

Some of this seems to relate to working with graduate students, and also trying to be cited as much as possible. 

The graduate students probably need more supervision than putting twenty on a single paper would provide. 

For being cited a lot, one of the things that came up was one person bragging about his H index, which started a big conversation on how some of the most important foundational work doesn't even get cited like that because it is part of the foundation and doesn't need a citation; everyone is familiar.

The one bragging appears to have deleted his post, but it was connected here to a brief but good thread :

https://x.com/DoloresGMorris/status/2058943409801371860 

It doesn't seem to be something that most authors are pursuing. If you publish something interesting that gives others ideas for extending the research, you probably will get cited, but is that the motivation or advancing knowledge?

Because knowledge won't be advanced by hallucinating AI. 

Arguing on-line, Star Wars style!

I know; I thought I was done with Star Wars too.

It happened because of one post yesterday that has already had over 446 thousand views:

https://x.com/CrungoCyle/status/2058872716233519316 

No woman will ever understand how it feels to watch an IP that was made for guys, be turned into girl-boss dogshit, all in the name of “inclusion” & to cater to people that were never interested in the IP to begin with.

Please excuse the language I have reproduced, but please take note of the ridiculous sense of aggrievement.

I know there were Star Wars movies playing on television yesterday. That's not unusual for a holiday weekend, but there may have been some extra push with the release of a new movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu.

We should also note that this is a reply. 

https://x.com/taskmasterfan/status/2058594492467310867 

no man will ever take away how it felt to see rey leading the franchise

In this case, the poster profile lists bid / rey as "taskmaster, star wars, mon mothma’s stylist. effie trinket irl!" So, in addition to some devotion to The Hunger Games (and if "bid" is a reference to The Hunger Games or some other franchise, I do not know), it is reasonable to assume that she has a strong emotional connection to Star Wars in general and Rey in particular.

She does not have a huge following (1180), so I assume most of her over 217 thousand views comes from people checking what CrungoCyle was responding to. Checking, I see an apology for her tweet bringing forth so many misogynists.

It was not her fault.

There are people who go around looking for ways to make trouble. In this case, the reply brought forth many responses arguing not only that there have always been many women and girls in the fandom, but also that Rey was far from the first "girl-boss" in the series, pointing mostly to Leia but also --to a lesser extent -- Padme, Jyn Erso, Mon Mothma, Ahsoka, and Holdo.

There are probably a lot more that could come up if we look at all the properties.

Of course, that was a big part of Crungo's complaint: they keep adding more girls, with their cooties. I suspect he is not thrilled with the inclusion of more characters of color. His profile and other replies show an affinity for the R-word and disdain for designating the word that way instead of just using it... that gives some character clues.

Other men jumped in with various excuses going in two different directions with different arguments for each.

One area was about the intended audience. Some argued that there may be outlying female fans, but it was geared toward boys. The gold bikini is one way of proving it, ignoring that putting Leia in the gold bikini directly led to her personally strangling Jabba. So there's that. Some also said that girls liking it was a later thing after the franchise started pandering to women; shame on Kathleen Kennedy, their special target of disgust.

She was not the only executive involved in those films, but she was the most prominent woman and I suspect that relates.    

It is historically true that girls will often watch material focusing on boys, while the reverse has not been true. This is one reason why Disney princess movies often have titles with some plausible deniability. The Princess and the Frog was perceived to have performed poorly due to having "princess" right there in the name, hence Tangled and Brave.

It is also logically true that capitalism is motivated toward making as much money as possible. A marketing strategy that shuns half the population is generally a bad idea. However, you can try and attract a smaller base but with stronger loyalty by making them feel like they are unfairly a minority. 

The other range of arguments related to Leia's inclusion. Here many of the examples were ignored other than Leia and Rey, though sometimes Padme was mentioned with Leia as a well-written character in contrast to Rey. Well, that was what they said then, right? That Rey was just not believable. I argued about that at the time.

That also had men chiming in that Leia wasn't so great. She was ungrateful to her rescuers, disparaging, and she didn't even have good ideas; going down into the trash compactor could have gotten them all killed!

Of course, being shot at in a narrow corridor by storm troopers wasn't exactly safe, and getting killed or re-captured would not be great. It didn't look like Luke or Han had any other ideas, but still, she needed those men to put her in her place.

She wasn't the one who blew up the Death Star! (She was a key person in getting those very necessary plans to the Rebellion, as was Jyn Erso, but Luke!) 

(Most of these dudes appear to align with the "great man" theory, which conveniently gets rid of the need to give credit to the many who are contributing. 

Okay, maybe I have some strong feelings too. I did not reply to any of those posts. I did like some that made good points, but there is no point in arguing.

Crungo has 37 followers; that's considerably fewer than bid / rey and all he does is get angry about feminism and men not being centered. Again, I am sure he could get really into racism and ableism and many other terrible things -- I have confidence in him for that -- but why should he get any attention at all?

Nothing is going to convince him. 

If you have loads and loads of women attesting to their love for the series, and then they are just told that they are outliers or not real or that it somehow doesn't count, why put energy into that argument?

Unfortunately, there is an aggrieved base out there eagerly looking for it and responding to it.  

It is frustrating that individuals can be so wrong and so loud about it without getting called on it, and maybe some of the arguments will make good points that some other people will see, but it feels wasteful.

I do often see tweets from blue checks that are designed to get reactions -- good or bad -- ("engagement farming") and it is my policy to ignore them. I am trying to connect to real people.

Sadly, I think Crungo is real, but he also really seems to suck; what point would there be in engaging?  

It's just unfortunate that the block function has been neutered.

Regardless, please note that there are people for whom no fact or personal testimony matters. It often corresponds with a hatred of wokeness. 

That might seem to be something connected to right wing politics, but the closed minds insisting on their point against all evidence is really prominent on the left as well.

What it really relates to is dominator culture.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/01/rey-does-stuff.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-moral-philosophy-of-star-wars.html 

AAPI Heritage Month odds and ends

There is one more category that I have been working on for a while, but I am not quite done with the reading. 

These books are the ones that did not fit, or that could have fit but the timing didn't, or maybe they fit better with something else.

It may work best as an example of how different readings connect, and how specific reading plans never really end. 

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler 

At the time of the Summer Reading Challenge for 2024, one of the categories was "A Friend's Favorite Book". I realized I didn't know a lot of friends' favorites, so I asked on Facebook. 

I got about thirty responses from eleven people (I already knew that picking a "favorite" is hard). There were not many that I had read before and I have only read about four since; it will take a while. 

One of them was Imbler's exploration of the body and self through marine biology. In some ways it is very fragmented, and maybe only some of the fragments will stick to you, but maybe they will be the ones you need. 

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige

I have already mentioned this in another post all about dialectics (which is a part of how Boggs is guided in her work) and because there was a children's book about her as well.

See, it is all connected. 

The Cat Who Chose to Dream by  Loriene Honda, illustrated by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani with Mark Deamer

This could have fit in with the picture books if I had read it sooner, but I stumbled across it checking something else, because the foreword was written by George Takei.

Mirikitani was held in Tule Lake with his family as a child. Discovering his art, Honda got permission to use the artwork for a book helping children process trauma, with Deamer helping to edit some of the artwork as needed. 

Honda is a psychologist, not an author, and there is some stiffness with the book as it is trying to teach the concepts, so maybe it is not best for children. 

It is an important reminder about things that we did not that long ago. There are still internment survivors, but they are aging. Mirikitani died before publication. 

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang 

This one almost fits into the other category, not yet written. However, while the family relationships are important, it is more about the history of China's transition from dynastic rule to being briefly a republic and then the takeover of Communism. 

There is a lot of information, which could easily be overwhelming, but it is so well-written that is not a problem and it really brings various historical figures to life. 

Of these four it is the most-recommended. It is also the longest, but not excessive for what you learn.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/05/childrens-books-for-aapi-heritage-month.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/dialectics.html 

I guess Poe Dameron is a leftist

I am taking this moment to note that plans being changed between Star Wars installments is nothing new. 

During The Empire Strikes Back, it seemed clear that the dominant romance of the first trilogy was Leia and Han. I still believe (or at least I hope) that no one had decided that Leia and Luke were twins yet when she planted that kiss on Luke to annoy Han and Luke sat back grinning.

Maybe making Rey the granddaughter of Palpatine to make her a dyad with Kylo Ren was important to give their "love" extra credence, but it was also part of a larger trend of making the series less woke.

Perhaps if we get back to the kid with the broom, he is descended from Count Dooku. 

(I guess the Sith aren't celibate.)

Charting the regression from where The Force Awakens starts to how The Rise of Skywalker ends....

• The amazing new force-having person is in fact descended from other powerful people with the force, just not the ones we like.
• Rose Tico will be sidelined.
• It is so imperative that Poe be straight that Keri Russell gets shoehorned in for a hot minute to give him a potential romance. Then two barely seen women kiss to appease those disappointed that Poe and Finn don't end up together.

I say that as someone who did not really pick up that vibe between Poe and Finn, but Commander D'Acy having a wife (a Black wife no less) who had not appeared in the other movies on was one more thing that felt forced.

Sure, there was a lot of online hate. The main cast was a woman, a Black man, and a LatinX man. Trolls objected to all of that, but in a series that is ultimately about the triumph of light over dark, good over evil, you're not supposed to give into the trolls. 

Then, when you try and appease the trolls without admitting even to yourself that you are doing it, it might lead to lower quality writing and plot points that don't feel organic.

If you don't admit it because there is a part of you that doesn't feel right when the hero is not a white man, you might overly favor the leading white guy. 

You might also find the not-Black guy close enough, and overly favor him.

Poe's refusal to trust that the women in charge led to a lot of deaths and loss that such a small force couldn't afford. . 

Oscar Isaac has charm and charisma in spades -- so you want to like him -- but there still should have been a reckoning. 

His plotting happened more during The Last Jedi, defying orders for a counterattack that takes a lot of lives early on, then sending Finn and Rose on the pointless Canto Bight mission and starting a mutiny toward the end. Maybe Rian Johnson would have dealt with that if he had done the last film, but there was enough mess in The Last Jedi to not think that's the answer.

Yes, you would not expect the Resistance to be as domineering as the First Order, but defying orders and mutiny tend to have severe punishments. There are good reasons for that, just as there are good reasons for there being exceptions if the orders are go against laws and ethics. However, "I think I know better than you" may not fit under that.

At some point there should have been guilt and anguish, even shunning by others, for arrogantly assuming that he knew better and the damage he caused.

It might be hard for a white male director to conceive of such a thing. 

Looking at the podbros, they are still insisting that Biden had dementia and Harris would have been exactly as abusive as Trump. that their reasoning was good, and they did not cause any damage, and show that they would rather go all out on supporting rich boys with Nazi tattoos than someone who understands governance, hard work, and commitment.

Being truly heroic requires listening and learning, not just being really passionate and having participated in something good before.

I don't like that guy; is it just me?

You know, I forgot something else that was ridiculous from The Last Jedi: Leia being blown into space by her son and then using the force to get back inside.  

How did so many bad scenes get through? 

If some of the issues with episodes 7 through 9 related to the change in directors, there were overriding influences. One requirement was that Kylo Ren must be redeemed.

That may have been the least believable part of his arc.

Darth Vader always seemed to be very in control. He kept trying to bring over his son, but that wasn't going to happen. That he eventually decided he would rather kill the Emperor than Luke (which also saved Leia) seemed plausible. 

That he would then automatically be smiling with Ben and Yoda is maybe less plausible. I don't feel like any of the writers have thought extensively about the process of choosing light and dark and changing those choices. For what we have seen of Vader, okay, I believe he would choose Luke.

For what it's worth, I also believe that the petulant, reactionary Kylo Ren would kill Snoke over Rey, but still want to rule the galaxy. 

What was less believable was that Rey would be drawn to him, that he would get all earnest and die, and that she would feel bad about the death.

For all the things that she cared about and saw him do, there should have been nothing appealing about him. If the plausibility was supposed to be carried over by the charm of Adam Driver, that was a misfire.

(Unless all of her pleas for him to put on a shirt means that it was his chest, but I still don't see the appeal.) 

It would have worked better without the love story.

I get some of the motivations.

Ben Solo was the only child of two beloved characters; you want to believe that he can become something better.

At the same time, he has done enough bad things that a completely happy ending would be hard to earn; deathbed repentance is a way around that. 

As long as he is dying, why does he need the girl? Why does she need the heartbreak?

I have a thought on why it went that way, but it needs to be explored through a different character. That's what comes next.   

The Last Jedi

First of all, let me make a comparison: 

The Force Awakens (2015) -- 2 hours, 18 minutes

The Last Jedi (2017) -- 2 hours, 32 minutes

The Rise of Skywalker  (2019) -- 2 hours, 21 minutes

All of those movies are long. The Last Jedi is, in fact, the longest, but the actual time difference is not as long as it feels.

When I thought about how long it felt, I would generally focus on the casino scene. Finn and Rose wander around a place that feels "alien" to all we have seen of Star Wars so far (though there was a casino on the star cruiser in the 1979 Brian Daley book, Han Solo's Revenge), with a lot of nonsense about how to look for a guy they never find, getting arrested over parking, and I cannot even remember whether they successfully disabled the tracking device. The way other things went, I am not sure that mattered. It gave them a chance to work in Maz Kanata, but it felt pretty forced.

When I think more, I remember other scenes that took too long and were not worth it:

• Poe continually restarting the message to annoy the First Order ship
• A newly-revived Finn walking around naked in something that appears to be a bacta suit (completely impractical), instead of a tank like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back
•  Rey and Kylo Ren's telepathic talks where she keeps asking him to put on a shirt

The scenes with Poe and Kylo Ren have to do with some other flaws that will be treated in other posts.

For Finn, that may have been partly a way of trying to draw similarities between him and Luke Skywalker. It did show that he is recovering from his severe injuries from the previous film, and it gives him a chance to reconnect with Poe, but mainly is played for laughs. 

It's not funny enough for the time involved.

Hearkening back to The Empire Strikes Back, there was humor, but generally just quick quips that played into the existing points.

• "Laugh it up, Fuzzball."
• "I'd just as soon kiss a Wookiee!" "I can arrange that."

Those scenes didn't break the dramatic tension.

Rian Johnson might not specialize in dramatic tension.

I like the Knives Out films a lot, but despite there always being a mystery and at least two murders, they are not action or suspense films. They explore things with humor.

They explore important things, too, and I sympathize with what the Canto Bight scenes are trying to do.

They are establishing that there are people whose wealth allows them to lead glamorous lives, without having to worry about what's going on in the rest of the galaxy or the welfare of those who serve them. 

That is reasonable, but it doesn't connect. While a lot of that situation could lead to a French Revolution-style uprising or a Bolshevik to Soviet path, the First Order seems more fascist; it would have different roots. If you can establish the roots maybe there is a point there, but it feels disconnected when it should be connected.

Then, with the children, they are also trying to establish that force prodigies can come from anywhere; you shouldn't overlook anyone. 

That is also not connected enough. If Rey being a nobody from nowhere and having the force strong in her does not show that; seeing the kid with the broom for a moment won't.

Then they had to decide that Rey was not that either. 

Focus on Minh Lê and Dan Santat

I didn't want to call this a spotlight, because separately they both have several books that I have not read.

This happened by accident.

If I recall correctly, Drawn Together came up when I was searching for something else and looked interesting. A grandparent and grandson have language barriers, but are able to connect through drawing. 

I liked it, but I didn't think about it much beyond that. However, I am not the only person in this household who goes through a lot of picture books. The other one brought home Built to Last (the structures two friends build in play always get knocked down, but their friendship doesn't) in April. 

Those names sounded familiar so I looked. It had been almost a year, but yes, this was the same pair. 

In looking to see if there were other collaborations, I found one, but I also saw that they have both done many superhero comics. 

That made it a good time to read The Blur. A bittersweet story about how fast children grow up, much of it is communicated in superhero metaphors.

At that point I did think that I should do a spotlight, but that can get tricky with one person; for two it would be much harder. 

I decided to look up at least one work by each of them. Without planning, they both ended up having a common theme.

2014 Caldecott Medal Winner The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend has one of the potential imaginary friends on the island where they are born get tired of waiting to be dreamed up. He travels across the ocean to a crowded playground and is eventually spotted and named.

Nine years later, Real to Me was published. Written by Minh Lê and illustrated by Raissa Figueroa, a furry green creature with big teeth and a long tail misses the friend who others insisted was imaginary and whose sudden disappearance makes him wonder whether she was ever real. He makes new friends eventually and is happy to have the memory.

Bittersweet, perhaps, but probably not as bad as Bing Bong in Inside Out.

I don't know what follows. Reading more from either of them seems likely; reading all from them would be a pretty big effort. 

That being said, I like their sensibilities. 

I don't know if they are friends who will be looking for more collaboration or it all came from publishing decisions, but I think they do good work together.

I am glad these books came my way. 

Minh Lê and Dan Santat Together:

Drawn Together (2016)
The Blur (2022)
Built to Last (2024)

Separately:

The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat (2014)
Real to Me by Minh Lê and Raissa Figueroa (2023)