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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃

@kellenhoxworth.bsky.social

1.2K followers 590 following 950 posts

Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY. Author of “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance”: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147072/transoceanic-blackface/

nupress.northwestern.edu

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · Oct 17

My book Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance is available from Northwestern University Press.

It maps the global history of blackface, minstrelsy, and related forms of racialized performance such as brownface and yellowface.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 10h

When the metaphor “we’re burning the planet for AI” literalizes:

niki grayson @nikigrayson.com · 15h

the city of los angeles burned in january in part because of a man who couldn’t stop generating images of burning cities on ChatGPT, and then after he lit the fire he asked if the fire he started was his fault

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 18h

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Feb 5

just saying: it's possible that "I'm gonna dramatically constrict my state capacity while plotting dramatic imperial expansion, and expanding my set of internal enemies while alienating most of my foreign allies" is the beginning of a world-historical masterstroke. but also possible that it isn't

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 21h

"It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

www.nytimes.com

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Peter Butler @peter-butler.bsky.social · 1d

Bloomberg research found wholesale electricity up ~270% in areas near data centers

It doesn't seem like nearly enough people are taking it seriously

One A.I. image isn't too much energy, but 5 million videos? Per day/hour/minute whatever. It's not sustainable

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

www.bloomberg.com

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 2d

Just need another one that says, “They don’t know that I don’t practice Santeria.”

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 2d

Can’t wait for politics to finally run on a Matthew Arnold-Brad Nowell axis.

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Chibdm @chibdm.bsky.social · 2d

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 3d

Will to Power and Grace

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 4d

The funniest thing in the world is someone posting something egregiously fake followed by “let that sink in.”

Debra Messing: @emmabenson92 I have nothing against Socialism, don't know where you got that. I voted against M because he celebrated 9/11.
Let that sink in. I love my country. My reasoning is not Islamophobia. I I've chosen to live in the most beautifully diverse city in the world.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 4d

Ironically, the Atlantic has played a major role in the gender revanchism trend.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 5d

They’re playing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Y Control” at the grocery store.

I am officially an Old.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 6d

He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 6d

I have Magnolia higher, but we can all agree that Licorice Pizza was a nadir.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 8d

The Aristocrats!

Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social · 8d

it's actually super-great that the Riyadh comedy festival both allowed these clowns to beshit their reputations AND ALSO allowed everyone to spend a news cycle observing that Saudi Arabia is a despotic nightmare

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 8d

The Aristocrats!

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 8d

The main thing I got out of the Ezra Klein-TNC interview was that I can read a podcast episode in 1/3 the time it takes Ezra Klein to debase himself with what amounts to really baroque self-pity.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

Hey hey now: let’s not forget their love affair with indentured servitude as a liberal-contractual form of legalized enslavement.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

“Awakening into truth” connotes a near religious conversion after which one is saved from lies.

“Staying woke,” if it has any religious undertones, suggests that lies are real and present dangers, and that devils walk among us waiting for us to allow our complacency to render us helpless.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

The other key to this is how the rightwing politics of “awakening” are antithetical to “staying woke.”

QAnon and the various forms of rightwing radicalization entice followers to facile understandings of politics as an awakening.

Staying woke is a longterm project that takes constant effort.

Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 10d

This is, after all, the original and authentic meaning of "stay woke." In fact, the perversion of "woke" into an epithet is perhaps the defining metaphor of our moment: Historical victims are not only being revictimized, but also mocked for never forgetting this is always a possibility in the US.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

Ironically, this nostalgia seems geared for precisely people who grew up seeking to escape suburban despair but who have found them evermore ensconced in it. So now they fabricate a lost past to yearn for from the prison of their own making.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

Also, the nostalgia misses the crucial context: whatever positive valence Walmart or Target or Perkins at 11 pm had for suburban kids, it was because it was a glimmer of freedom, autonomy, and escapism from the otherwise banal ennui that pervades suburban life.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 11d

[INT. JERRY’S APARTMENT]

Gregor Costanza: I swear, I just woke up like this!

Jerry: You woke up as a cockroach!?

Gregor Costanza: I woke up like a cockroach!

Kramer: (shudder mumbles)

Jerry: Well, on the bright side, maybe this solves your Susan problem?

[LAUGH TRACK. BASS.]

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

I propose that we call this form of revanchist nationalistic nostalgia “Old Nobyism.”

grimm ☀️ @mugrimm.bsky.social · 9d

This is doing numbers on social media right now and it's so depressing how people truly yearn for this shit and want to preserve that feeling indefinitely like a mausoleum of false memories.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

At least now we can just call this form of perennial nationalistic nostalgia “Old Nobyism.”

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 11d

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 11d

Really appreciate this two-part series from @adriandaub.bsky.social and @moiradonegan.bsky.social, if only because it reminded me of when Phyllis Schlafly called me and my friends “a bunch of losers.”