Chris Becker

@chrisbecker

Associate Professor in Film, Television, and Theatre and the Sport, Media, & Culture Minor at University of Notre Dame. Working on a local TV history project:

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Chris Becker@chrisbecker· 28d

I mean, cats, am I right? Seriously, though

Photo of a cute (redundant) cat sitting in a very large Chewy box and looking at the camera like she knows this is basic cat shit but what else can she do, right?

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· 29d

There’s also this part, where he could only enlist when got OFF the meds that presumably helped to keep him stable.

Screenshot of text from the article:

“Brouillette was initially rejected by military recruiters because of his mental health diagnoses, but recruiters encouraged him to go off his medications for a year and reapply, which he did, his immediate relative said.

He was eventually able to enlist.”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· 29d

Ken has replied!

Screenshot of an email:

The text:

"Hi Chris --

Wow! Thanks for sharing these photos. Corri and her sister are awesome. I love that tattoo, and here's the shot that inspired it:"

Image of Big Bird facing the camera, rural road behind him, street sign reading "No Thru Road" on the right

Screenshot of an email reply:

"A couple of months ago, the Motion Picture Academy Museum held a matinee screening of Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, and I did a Q&A along with Debra Spinney (aka - Mrs. Big Bird). Here's a photo from the event. Please feel free to share it with Corri."

Photo of three people seat on a stage with a slide projected on a large screen behind them identifying the participants and featuring a Big Bird photo

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jul 5

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jul 2

Screenshot of text from the essay:

That’s the thing nobody tells you about these long fights. The arc doesn’t move in a straight line. The Boy Scouts changed, not because any court told them to, but because people came to understand how wrong it was to exclude a kid for who he was. That understanding built slowly, over the years, because people like you refused to disappear. Someday, I believe, America will understand with the same clarity why excluding transgender kids is wrong. When that day comes, it will be because of what you built. The record you made. The five years you actually competed and showed everyone watching that the sky did not fall.

Today’s ruling will never erase that.

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jun 1

This is a cat checkpoint. Relinquish your most recent cat picture on your phone.

Low-angle shot of a sleepy cat on cat condo platform, head resting on a paw

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jun 1

"The National Memorial for Peace and Justice names more than four thousand victims of lynching on steel monuments organized by county, and a duplicate set of those monuments lies on the grounds outside, available for counties to claim. Most have not come. That unclaimed field is itself an argument, patient and silent, about which memories a community chooses to carry forward and which it prefers to leave on the ground."

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· May 22

Writer (and @ndftt.bsky.social alum) Liz Hynes says a profound goodbye to a profoundly good human in Stephen Colbert and offers a requiem for the Late Show. lizhynes.substack.com/p/good-night

Screenshot from the post: "much has been said about what this means For Democracy, and of course the answer is nothing good. it is scary and bad and i’m obviously enraged that 200 excellent jobs, many of them union, have been deleted from the entertainment landscape. i’m furious that my brilliant friends were putting out popular, quality work and are now needlessly adrift in an industry that’s eroding at alarming speed. but i spend a lot of time being mad — occupational hazard. we can put that on the shelf for later. i can’t let my fury for what should still be eclipse my gratitude for what was."

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Apr 28

What the fuck is this new fresh hell of an AI icon sitting at the bottom of my Google doc. Quit getting all up in our shit!!!

Screenshot of the bottom of a Google doc, where the evil Gemini icon rests

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Apr 14

Screenshot from the post with this text: This will be one of Elon Musk's legacies, and the most consequential one for human life. A man who talks about saving our species condemned millions to death because he could not discern reality from a paranoid fantasy. While DOGE massively exaggerated its contributions — remember when the Trump administration said it cared about deficits? — it should not be
allowed to minimize its greatest one, which is to dramatically increase human misery and death among the most vulnerable. No-one associated with that organization should be allowed to wash away the the stain of death.

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Apr 12

Analyzing Trump decisons🤝 Santos figuring out weird cases #ThePitt

Screenshot of Santos from THE PITT, with text of her quote overlaid: "I just think, 'What's the stupidest thing this person could have done?" and assume they did it.

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Apr 5

Within you (and my house) are two cats: one fired up to take a swipe at the world and one worried about what happens if the swipe misses #caturday

Low-angle photo of a cat on the top of a cat tree taking a right-pawed swipe at the camera. His name is Coley, and he is a scamp.

Cat laying down on her side and looking at the camera with a pensive face. Her name is Livie, and she really wishes there weren’t so many scary sounds in the world.

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Apr 3

The four coolest people (not) on the planet

A livestream screenshot of the four astronauts on NASA's Artemis II mission in the Orion spacecraft. They're all laughing and seemingly having the time of their lives.

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 31

Warm enough to sit outside at midnight #springisnear

Photo of tree branches up against the night sky with some accents of light from nearby houses

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 29

God bless the Chicago karaoke bar we went to tonight that had this glorious trio of photos just outside our door #BearDown

A horizontally stacked trio of photos featuring 1980s Chicago Bears icons Walter Payton and Jim McMahon, on a wall between a pair of karaoke room doors

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 28

It was a good day to be in Chicago

No Kings March photo. A handwritten sign says “The power of the people is greater than the people in power” as the crowd walks in front of the Trump building in Chicago

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 23

Screenshot of text from the article: “Mark, like much of the extraction class, is only allowed to fail upward, swaddled in the bold innovative mythologies constructed by the American access press and the numerous orbital sub-economies invested in the pretense.
Ok
Obviously Mark's job isn't being creative, interesting, or good. It's being deftly full of shit in just such a way as to convince Wall Street that the delusion of permanent quarterly growth at impossible-to-manage-scale is a real and useful thing, even if the underlying products being sold are cumbersome turds most people hate using.”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 15

Search your camera roll for “Hell”

Screenshot of two skeets.

Top one: Bruce Arthur @brucearthur.bsk... • 7m
Mariners fans must be smoking cigarettes like the file photo of Homer

Bottom one: Bruce Arthur @brucearthur.bs... • 34s
Here's the thing with sports: when you're in the high-pressure playoff spaces, it might feel like hell. But that's the greatest thing about sports fandom: you get to feel it. You get to live and die. Feel it, live it, embrace it.
You might never forget it, and how many things are like that?

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Mar 11

Fittingly enough, every single word of this fierce piece of writing is crucial. But these particular sections of words are my favorites.

Screenshot of text: I am sick to death of this — of the tech industry deciding it can do what it wants without consequences. Everything is a subscription, everything is harder to use and enshittified. Everything is built on something that was stolen or degraded. So-called AI – which is not intelligent at all – is being shoved into everything, and makes nothing better (quite the reverse). “Move fast and break things” now extends to the reputations and identities of respected professionals and creative people. And you have the nerve to presume we should all put up with every outrage, with every act of destruction, with every theft. I don’t. I won’t.

I don’t condone this. I don’t condone what Grammarly has done, to myself or anyone being touted as an expert on your site. I don’t condone any of these slop machines stealing people’s work without compensation and filling people’s minds with shitty art or crap writing that is full of inaccuracies.

Screenshot of text: You should all be ashamed.

You should be ashamed of where you work. Not just Grammarly or Superhuman or whatever comically dumb name you come up with next. Almost everyone running tech firms, most people in positions of responsibility, pretty much every C-suite type — congrats, you’re all making the world a worse place. People used to be excited about tech, now they dread what data you're going to steal next, they dread what violation of privacy or the environment will turn up next. There are people in tech who want to do good, but they’re consistently outvoted or stampeded by selfish hucksters and thieves. What the vast majority of those with power are doing or enabling is shamefully disrespectful and destructive. Everyone hyping and shilling for all this? You shouldn’t be proud of making people dumber or stealing from people. Because LLMs and the whole AI hype machine — it’s just idiocy, plagiarism, greed and theft on a grand scale.

Screenshot of text: These plagiarism machines simply regurgitate what has been fed into them. They are not capable of true art, real creativity, the kind of structure, nuance and depth that are the hallmarks of worthy acts of creativity. These slop machines are wrong a lot of the time, they encourage people to do terrible things, and they are simply bad for the world. I feel sad for anyone who uses them, because they’re degrading the human condition — the ability to know and care and understand. All this theft, stupidity and degradation is not only bad and harmful — it's unnecessary.

Because actual writers and artists and creative folks are right here! All we want is baseline respect and reasonable compensation. But the snake-oil salespeople involved in pushing these the hallucinating plagiarism machines on the rest of us think any compensation is too much! The executives ruining human discourse and the planet – they must be lavishly paid. Actual creators — we get exactly nothing. No money, no respect, no consent.

And so, from the bottom of my underpaid, deeply creative heart: Fuck you.

Screenshot of text: What’s wrong with you? Seriously, what is wrong with you? Why do you want to shit on entire swathes of human endeavor and wreck the planet while you’re doing it? Why are you so determined to be awful and amoral? Everything about your priorities is messed up, and you should all be heartily ashamed, abashed and embarrassed.

Go fuck yourselves. And get my name out of your mouths.

Sincerely,

Maureen “Mo” Ryan

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Feb 24

I bought this cap to wear at a Notre Dame Gender Resource Center panel on sports, media, and masculinity last week, and in only a few days since, it has doubled in cultural value.

Black ball cap with lettering that reads “Currently thinking about Heated Rivalry and political revolution”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jan 31

Quote tweet:

@AntiClimaco on X.com
Trying to scan the QR code on the ICE agent choking me but first I have to watch a 10 second FanDuel ad

Embedded tweet:

@AndrewSolender Scoop in here: Rep. Ritchie Torres introducing a bill that would require ICE officers to wear QR codes that you can scan to get their full name, badge number and other identifying info....

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jan 30

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Jan 27

Screenshot of a paragraph from the article: “The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren't possible: "Social bonds form among people who have something in common," Vance said in a speech last July. "If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally" Vance's remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Dec 29

Welp, the post right before yours sure set the stage

Screenshot of posts:
Quote post: D(oc) Oc(k) @frittersandclam.... • 15m this happened to me during a week long power outage. my husband is T1D and we needed refrigerator for insulin specifically but also it was late summer and so hot. me saying repeatedly "but you know there is a week long power outage" didn't move them at all. i was furious.
Embedded post: Maryn McKenna @maryn... • 10h In America, where irony is dead, a hotel chain uses a policy denying shelter to local people, for fear of accidentally housing homeless persons...
To deny a reservation to the author of a much-lauded book on how American economic unfairness forces working people into homelessness.

Immediately preceding post: treb @treblaw.bsky.social • 15m
what sick disgusting company or individual at said company are we going to learn about today
21 019R乙
iamelle @ Miamellehouie net • 24m

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Dec 23

lol

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Dec 16

I tried to give this article a good faith read, but here’s where I tapped out.

Screenshot of a paragraph from the article: “Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the performative allyship that had become expected. "I always thought I was an effeminate nerd growing up... but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine end of men in media," he told me. "I started to pick up on the fact that there wasn't much room for people who even speak in my timbre."”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Dec 13

This was immediately after Coley spent about 10 minutes in 25-degree temps outside in the catio

Cat standing at a heat vent with his face up against the grill

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Nov 30

Subscribe to The Onion to keep up with the latest tech developments

$THE ONION Al Chatbot That Only Responds 'Huh' Valued At $200 Billion TOOL REPEATS SINGLE-SYLLABLE EXPRESSION OF MILD INTEREST PALO ALTO, CA-Hailing the new product as a "game changer" in the development of large language models, Silicon Valley insiders confirmed Tuesday that an AI chatbot that only responds "huh" had been valued at $200 billion. "The new HmmAI chatbot is like nothing we've seen before, able to answer 'huh' to text and image-based inputs with a muted indifference indistinguishable from that of an actual human being," said industry analyst Debra Nelson, adding that the new chatbot had already replaced the flesh-and-blood therapists of tens of thousands of users. "HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intel-ligence, responding to prompts about recipe ideas, ancient history, or even advanced nuclear physics with the word 'huh' in just a fraction of a second. This chatbot is going to revolutionize productivity and is worth every penny of its $200 billion valuation. Having a whole team of experts who exclusively say 'huh' right in your pocket isn't just science fiction anymore, and if you don't incorporate HmmAl into your company's workflow right now, you're going to be left behind." At press time, HmmAI representatives were downplaying allegations that the chatbot continually saying "huh" had convinced hundreds of teenagers to kill themselves.”$

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Nov 10

A screenshot from the post: “I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police. What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink. I want you to think about elections in this future. I want you to understand that every issue you care about-any hope of participatory democracy-is downstream of this.”

Chris Becker@chrisbecker· Nov 8

Failed to properly lock my bike up today on campus and found it up in a tree. I salute those keeping honored ND traditions alive. 🫡