Tobias Wilson-Bates
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phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Tobias Wilson-Bates
@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
10K followers 4K following 13K posts
Time Machines. Temporality. Ecology. Robots. Education. Associate Professor of 19th century British Literature.
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phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Man, some passages just stick deep in you and stay there. Love this from Susan Griffin's "Our Secret"
Often I have looked back into my past with a new insight only to find that some old, hardly recollected feeling fits into a larger pattern of meaning. Time can be measured in many ways. We see time as moving forward and hope that by our efforts this motion is toward improvement. When the atomic bomb exploded, many who survived the blast say time stopped with the flash of light and was held suspended until the ash began to descend. Now, in my mind, I can feel myself moving backward in time. I am as if on a train. And the train pushes into history. This history seems to exist somewhere, waiting, a foreign country behind a border and, perhaps, also inside me. From the windows of my train, I can see what those outside do not see. They do not see each other, or the whole landscape through which the track is laid. This is a straight track, but still there are bends to fit the shape of the earth. There are even circles. And returns.
November 28, 2025 at 7:29 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Pump those finely-tuned semantic arguments into my veins!
Barnie from the Simpsons getting beer IV
November 28, 2025 at 3:34 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...
Dozens of Division I public institutions lose between $20 and $40 million annually on sports. Public university athletic departments that lose roughly $40 million per year or more include the Universities of Connecticut, Houston and Massachusetts and James Madison University. And these numbers are based on National Collegiate Athletic Association statistics, provided by the universities, that top economists say can significantly understate the true deficits.
November 28, 2025 at 4:39 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
This is the Hamilton Mill branch of the Gwinnett County Public Library
Inside and outside images of a great library
November 26, 2025 at 4:19 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Not to brag, but my local public library has the best Staff Picks displays. I have found SO MANY good reads on these 🤯
Staff Picks library book display
November 26, 2025 at 3:58 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
RIP Jimmy Cliff, one of the formative albums of my childhood
The Harder They Come album cover
November 24, 2025 at 12:58 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Manifesting this for me
Old librarian in cluttered library from Neverending Story
November 23, 2025 at 4:49 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Dostoevsky really will just end a paragraph with a line that comes from outer space and makes you reread the entire paragraph:
They emerged from the gateway and directed their steps through the wood. The landowner Maksimov, a man of some sixty years, did not so much walk as rather almost run at their side, examining them all with a convulsive, almost outlandish curiosity. There was something about his eyes that was reminiscent of a lobster.
November 22, 2025 at 12:12 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
It’s giving
Scene from Doctor Strangelove where a soldier rides an atom bomb to the end of the world
November 20, 2025 at 7:08 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
This one!
The city and its uncertain walls
November 13, 2025 at 6:13 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
SNL prophesied the Bluesky user base with this Ryan Gosling skit
Still from the Avatar uses papyrus font skit
November 12, 2025 at 3:15 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then he Whom Thunder hath made greater?
November 12, 2025 at 2:58 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Enough characters for the first volume of a Dickens novel
Joke dog looking at you to help you appreciate the joke
November 11, 2025 at 8:28 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
"Stop he's already dead" Simpsons' meme but it's George Eliot destroying Moby-Dick
November 11, 2025 at 6:15 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
I’m hearing a lot of controversy already about how he’s choosing to depict Casaubon
Wrinkly Pan’s Labyrinth creature who really is basically Casaubon
November 10, 2025 at 10:14 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Pawn shop meme with the caption "best I can do is specious parallelism"
November 10, 2025 at 5:53 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Every shot in this movie is ready to be cut apart and reanimated to live on as a tormented remnant
Sexy monster about to get it Victor looking in a mirror and seeing three Victors who are looking at him monster wearing a really comfy coat
November 10, 2025 at 3:29 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Regardless of how you feel about the new Frankenstein adaptation, I think we can all agree it is a rousing success at producing meme-content, and, in that alone, is well worth existing.
Del Toro showing Oscar Isaac how thirst-trap monster is going to blow up online
November 10, 2025 at 3:26 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
having a spine has proven ineffective, so our new strategy is to become vaguely sentient floating jelly
a jellyfish, or, as it is now called, the Path Forward for America
November 10, 2025 at 3:23 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
I want Oscar Isaac to play a different version of the Victor Frankenstein character every three years for the rest of his life
Oscar Isaac playing Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who goes too far and suffers the consequences Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina playing a scientist who goes too far and suffers the consequences Oscar Isaac in the movie Annihilation playing a scientist who goes too far and suffers the consequences
November 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
*me, trying to get the school to pay for food and drinks at events
child Victor Frankenstein thinking "and there, for decades, I tried to..." grown Victor Frankenstein saying "expand the narrow limits of academia"
November 10, 2025 at 2:49 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
A good way to rid one's self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.

-William Morris (advising you touch grass)
Morris’ Daisy pattern. Daisies will likely never disappoint you the way politics do.
November 10, 2025 at 12:53 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

-William Morris
William Morris giving his “I’m disappointed” face
November 10, 2025 at 12:41 PM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Astronaut meme but the text is “wait, it’s all just StarCraft?” Then “Always has been”
November 10, 2025 at 2:16 AM
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Hobbes must’ve felt like a fucking god telling the illustrator about this insane cover concept
The sovereign megazord from Hobbes’ Leviathan
November 9, 2025 at 7:37 PM