Gaming, pizza, and beer

13 May 2026

It's nice when things work out.

Yesterday was a long but rewarding day. To meet administrative, teaching, and social obligations, I piled activities on for yesterday. Faculty at KU are obliged to consult with first year students to help them get settled, field any questions they might have, and help them address any difficulties they might face. I decided to copy Professor Rudolf's approach of hosting one big pizza party. This gets it all done at once, offers a food everyone likes, and overcomes many student's fears of meeting their professor alone. So I scheduled that for 6pm after my three hour afternoon class on Tuesday (yesterday). Monday I received an email for a GSIS alum, who did a PhD on Korea's influence in global gaming and is now a post-doc at the university's Research Institute for Korean Studies. He suggested a drink, so I tacked it on to the evening.

In the middle of the day on Tuesday, I remembered that one of my Master's students wants to do her thesis on gaming, of which I know almost nothing. So I invited her to join us, and she was fortunately free.

Anyway, all that was a lot of pointless detail to get to a beer at the Beer Warehouse in Anam, where the three of us talked gaming. It turns out to be fascinating and rich with research possibilities. But the best thing was to bring two people with shared interests together in a way that is likely to enrich both of their lives.

It seems that one of my main roles is connecting people. Too bad I don't know more of them!

AI and writing

11 May 2026

It doesn't come as a surprise, but I am not the only one thinking about AI and writing in the way described below. Today I came across this Guardian essay by Micah Nathan that describes students at MIT using AI to write fiction(!). He argues that it is the struggle of transforming ideas into words that is the critical core of writing. The struggle itself transforms the author. And the transformation is the point.

AI and thesis writing

8 May 2026

Yesterday I gave the talk on thesis writing that I give every semester. I made two significant changes this semester.

The first was to experiment with Quarto for composing the presentation and with reveal.js for the visual engine. I have long used LaTeX and Beamer, which I love, but I thought it was time to learn some new tricks. Plus, I've been increasingly using Markdown for my own files, since Markdown now seems to be considered the most pliable format. It can easily be converted to HTML, LaTeX, ODT, etc. So, while the formatting is simpler, it allows you to focus on the content more than the design. Or rather, it focuses on the content and structure while allowing you to indulge in design separately. And a version of Markdown is Quarto's native tongue. And since Quarto's goal is to use Pandoc to allow for the seamless export of a file into a myriad of different forms and to allow for the incorporation of code, which I hope to use for my development book (if it ever gets off the ground), I decided to experiment.

The second change was to incorporate thoughts on how to use AI in writing a thesis. I realized that my own thoughts were confused on the topic, so I started asking colleagues and ultimately conducted a simple (and somewhat flawed) survey of GSIS faculty and students. It turns out that everyone is confused, as you can see from the histograms sprinkled throughout the presentation. On many topics both students and faculty have very different notions of what is acceptable, with both groups ranging across some items from totally unacceptable to totally acceptable. For example, drafting an outline or overall structure is widely distributed, though faculty tends to reject this use and students to accept it. A more even distribution was found for organizing a lit review or identifying gaps in the literature. (Unfortunately, this is a double-barreled question and the two activities should have been distinguished.) This surprised me, since I think the most important thing is for students to do the work of uncovering the gaps. There are other areas where there are clear preferences. For example, faculty are definitely opposed to allowing an LLM to fully write chunks of a thesis, while some students seem to think it is okay. Faculty are also sanguine about using AI to generate or refine survey questions and interview guides, as well as summarizing, transcribing, and extracting themes from interviews and documents (though this is another double-, triple-, quadruple-barreled question!).

But for me the bottom line take home lesson (other than the fact that students should check with their advisor first) is that writing a thesis is a learning exercise. If one wants to be competitive and employed in the future, individuals need more than a degree. They need skills. They need to have internalized the abilities that allow them to manipulate and manage AIs to get desirable results. And you can only do this by doing the hard work. Learning requires work and struggle. Struggle is often unpleasant, and that is where AI's promises seduce us. It will sort through the confusion and discomfort for us. But this means ceding our own power, our own ability, to AI. And that leaves us undernourished.

Edit: I shared some of these ideas with my students this afternoon and stumbled upon a pithy summary of my argument for thinking: "If you use AI for everything, then you will be the person AI replaces."

Walking

2 May 2026

I just went for a walk.

It wasn't a long walk. But it was just a walk. No purpose aside from responding to a faint impulse to move through the moist cool evening air. For tomorrow I am likely to be kept indoors by rain.

In a small way it was a big thing. Lately I've been reflecting on the inflection point I feel I am in the midst of. My kids no longer need me the way they used to. They are taking those fledgling steps into independence where my presence appears to be more hindrance than help. Up to now, everything has been done for them. Though there is yet much to do for them, I am no longer a guide or essential resource for learning simple things that spark simple delight, like the father I saw this evening teaching his daughters how to slingshot their sparkling fairies up into the sky and watch them swirl back down. Now I have been shifted to the background. I provide allowances and rides to friends' houses, visits to the doctor and occasional help with homework, a safe home and love on demand.

Since everything was shaped by their needs, the elements of my own life have been driven by obligation. I cook healthy food to stay healthy. I cycle to stay healthy. I teach to earn money (and hopefully inspire). I live apart from my family to pay the bills and give them a better life. I make popcorn and watch a movie on Friday nights because I have scheduled downtime. Necessity seems to dictate my actions. And necessity seems to eviscerate the impulse, the joy.

I need to break free from continuous necessity. Others' needs have dominated my choices---often delightfully so. But they do not have to determine all my choices any longer. I've watched all the TV. I've consumed the news. It is now time to identify and indulge in my own needs.

And so I've begun to experiment. I've begun to revisit old excitements to see if they still hold my interest. I've begun to be receptive to faint desires to see where they take me.

And I've just gone for a walk.

It's official. I'm old.

19 April 2026

It's official. I'm old.

For the last couple of weeks I've been reflecting on getting older. My body doesn't work quite the way it used to. Sometimes I feel like my brain isn't a quick and nimble as I've known it to be. The possibility of being past my prime seems more real. And I've grown nostalgic for that passing of flowering youth. Some of this may have been precipitated by cherry blossom season here in Korea, as there is no more classic image of the fleeting beauty of new beginnings.

A friend asked if my ruminations were part of a midlife crisis. They probably are. I'm hoping that it's the end phase where one makes peace with who they have been, who they failed to become, and who they can be. It would be about time. I feel like I've been in a slow motion midlife crisis for a couple of decades.

But now I think it's official. I went to the ophthalmologist this morning for an emergency evaluation. Yesterday at lunch, Vision in my right eye was suddenly interrupted by an eye floater and flashes of light at the periphery of my sight. My internet diagnosis suggested it could a retinal tear, which should be dealt with promptly. If I were in the US, I might have ignored it, since the flashing seems to have gone away. But this is Korea, where national health care allowed me to get a full exam for lots of eye issues for just $40. And fortunately, a local ophthalmologist is open Sunday mornings.

After waiting for enormous crowds (despite arriving a couple of minutes after they officially opened), I got my tests and sat down with the doctor. After showing my some cool photos of my eyeball and retina, the doctor informed me that it was nothing serious. Rather, the floater and flashes were an "aging event".

And there it is. I'm officially old. My health is being affected by "aging events". The deterioration has officially begun.

Sources of knowledge and understanding

11 April 2026

Much of my life seems to involve relearning the obvious.

Like many, I have spent and still spend time worrying about the youngs' shift away from reading, especially my children's. I am an academic, and since I read SE Hinton's The Outsiders (or was it Rumblefish in fifth grade, I have loved books. They constitute the core of my being.

But I find myself also reading less than I used to. I have developed a habit of watching an hour or two of TV of film before sleeping most days. Part of me worries that I am losing my passion for books or getting lazy. So perhaps my concern for the young population is simply transference.

But over the winter I read a "the kids are alright" article by a librarian that began to shift my thinking. The article argued that writing is simply one format for transferring knowledge and that young people have simply expanded the range of information formats they employ, increasing their reliance on videos, summaries, blogs, podcasts, etc. It also points out that knowledge transfer has historically been oral and that writing is a comparatively new technology. Once one opens their mind to this possibility, it makes perfect sense. I grew up getting news from radio broadcasts and evening news programs. I loved watching science documentaries. Why not recognize the value of podcasts, documentaries, and so on?

Many worry that the emotive content leads many to a dull, unquestioning acceptance of knowledge from charismatic influencers. But demagoguery and gullibility has always been with us. One might argue that the post-truth era of AI fakes and internet ravings are actually cultivating a more critical mindset among young people. Studies consistently show that young people are better at discriminating the quality of information than older people. Most effectively compartmentalize the artificial humanity the olds worry about, as this article from the NY Times indicates.

In contemplating these concerns, my focus has been on social scientific knowledge. But yesterday, I had a revelation. "Revelation" is perhaps to strong a term. "Insight" is probably more accurate. I've been lecturing on the long history of racial capitalism the last couple of weeks. By chance, The Dig Radio put out a couple of relevant podcasts to which I listened, following a recommendation to watch The Act of Killing, which makes an incredibly visceral impression. Then, in class, to back up claims that historical slavery in Africa differed from industrial slavery in the Americas, I referred students to Achebe's classic, All Things Fall Apart, telling my students that they can get a feel for how society worked at the time. Then, yesterday, when discussing the Middle Passage, I referred to Lupe Fiasco's Drogas Wave, incorrectly attributing it to Kendrick Lamar. A student commented that she appreciated my use of hip hop references around these topics, and it hit me. To humanize ourselves, our actions, and our policies, we need all these sources of knowledge. A movie, a song, a painting, a dance, all communicate to us different feelings and experiences of the human condition.

And when doing policy, our goal should be to improve the human condition.

AI magic

28 March 2026

I might be sold. I just vibe coded my first app using Claude and Claude Code. And it was remarkably easy.

I know that's what everyone says. "It is so easy." But it was. I doubt it is easy if you have no notion of how to code. You have to at least have a sense of how the code accesses and manipulates data. You have to have some comfort around error codes, so that you can find the right prompt to get them fixed. And at least being able to loosely interpret the code couldn't hurt, though it doesn't seem to be obligatory. But with even my rudimentary knowledge it was trivial. I had my simple app running well in about two hours. And I would not have been able to do it myself without a lot of time and fuss. It might have been fun, but it would never have gotten done.

But I think the truly exciting aspect of this first vibe coding session is that I came up with an app that is uniquely tailored to my use case. I did not have to find a generalized app that can do everything. I developed an app (or Claude developed an app?) that reflects my individual work flow and narrow needs. Magical.

"Quizmaker" is designed to generate reading comprehension quizzes for individual readings or collections of readings in formats that can be directly uploaded my LMS and my Discord Quizcord account for use in class. The app extracts the text from each PDF in a folder, sends it to Claude for quiz generation, allows the user to edit the questions, and then exports each quiz in two formats. Quizmaker will save me hours upon hours of generating my own questions. I recognize that there might be value in composing my own questions, but I do not have the time. This is like having a TA create quiz questions for you.

Next step: Testmaker. Midterm exams are coming!

FAC'ing FAC

8 December 2025

Another prolific blogging semester! Here is my second and probably last post for the semester. Don't know if I was lazy or busy, but I suppose I'll review that around the new year.

Today I am simply writing to announce that part one of a two part podcast with me as a guest dropped last week. The Foreign Tigers podcast is run by two recent KU GSIS graduates. They invited me to share my developing thoughts about the future of capitalism and techno-feudalism. Drawing on Arrighi's work, I argue that we are entering a new systemic cycle of accumulation that I call fully automated capitalism (FAC) and that technofeudalism is the political economic geography toward which the global economy is trending. You can check out part one here. I still haven't dared to listen to it myself!

I had a great time with these guys. I hope we have future chances to explore.

Labor and value

13 September 2025

I've just returned to teaching after a yearlong sabbatical. I clearly need some practice to warm back up. My attempted class discussion on surplus value (based on the first chapter of David Harvey's The Limits to Capitaldid not go nearly as smoothly as I had hoped.

Fundamental to my struggle was my newfound understanding of Harvey's argument that "value" in the economic sense (and the sense that dominates our contemporary understanding) is bound up with the quantification embodied in the money commodity in the evolution of capitalism. The implication of this was tripping me up. It means that even use value entails a quantitative measure of value, even though people often treat it---as I did---as antithetical to quantifiable exchange value. That is, many of us talk about use value as being outside of capitalist exchange and therefore something to prioritize when pressing for social change. Though it is still something to prioritize, it is not outside of exchange. Marx and Harvey are clear that use value is inherently economic because a commodity without use value lacks demand and therefore value.

But I also wanted bring out the notion that some non-capitalist formations have no need to attribute value to the things in their world. If these "things", these products of labor, are not commodities, they do not have use value or exchange value as Marx presents them. Instead, they have value in a different sense, in the send that they are important to survival and social reproduction. Because this latter notion of value is so close to use value, differing primarily in their relation to exchange, I had trouble articulating the concept of surplus value.

If we overlook this complication, the explanation of surplus value becomes simpler. Surplus value is the value created by labor for which labor is not compensated. Value is the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. Labor power is a commodity that has an exchange value. If laborers were compensated for all the value they create, then exchange value would equal value. Due to the unequal relations between the owners of capital and workers, however, workers are not compensated for all the value they create. Instead, their wages buy enough labor power to generate value sufficient not only to pay their wages but also to line the capitalists' pockets.

How this surplus value, this "accursed share", is dealt with is the fundamental problem of capitalism and the core driver of uneven geographical development.